Y'know, over the years there have been a lot of things that you and I don't exactly see eye-to-eye on, but this? Dead straight.
Like Obi-Wan said, "only a Sith deals in absolutes". Clearly the OP enjoys the game or he wouldn't play it. It's also clear he doesn't enjoy it AS MUCH as he wishes he did. Those 2 things are not mutually exclusive, so whether you agree with him nor not(I have my complaints, but enjoy it overall) stop acting like you can't understand what he actually meant.
I happen to like MMOs more if they are built around the idea of emergent gameplay. Where everything isn't all scripted and everyone experiences the same thing. Sure there can be gameplay loops as they are effective in moving players around in the Gameworld who otherwise might just stagnate without something to motivate them. A persistent environment managed by systems where the player can simply head off in one direction and eventually encounter something new and exciting, and most importantly UNSCRIPTED is essential to hold me for more than just short bursts of gameplay.
In a game where emergence is the core element, Anything I do matters beyond just my own character. And my experiences are impacted by what others do as well. This makes gameplay immersive for me, and if I cannot get immersed, then the game gives me little reason to devote time, let along MONEY, to it. That's the case for me here.
Everything here is designed around everyone experiencing the same thing, and eventually rolling a new toon with maybe a different origin story and then end up repeating the process... Everything is scripted. My character is essentially the same as everyone else. The only thing that makes my character my own is the ability to customize appearance to the degree that the game allows. That is something they got VERY right. But that is as far as owning a unique experience goes.
It ANNOYS me that this game generates so much revenue but cannot afford a large enough staff to continue creating the awesome mission content they make AND create back-end systems to facilitate emergence and therefore grant players the ability to do MEANINGFUL things BETWEEN mission releases. If this game had that, I think I would spend a lot more time, and probably some money. As it is, I am compelled to spend neither.
It's got nothing to do with affording staff. STO is tightly scripted on purpose. There have at times been bits of emergent gameplay players have come up with themselves, these usually get "fixed" sooner or later.
A persistent environment managed by systems where the player can simply head off in one direction and eventually encounter something new and exciting, and most importantly UNSCRIPTED is essential to hold me for more than just short bursts of gameplay.
There is nothing that is unscripted in a game besides the players. If you walk off into a direction, and encounter a patrol of enemies doing something, its because they were programmed to do so. That is simply how games work.
It ANNOYS me that this game generates so much revenue but cannot afford a large enough staff to continue creating the awesome mission content they make AND create back-end systems to facilitate emergence and therefore grant players the ability to do MEANINGFUL things BETWEEN mission releases. If this game had that, I think I would spend a lot more time, and probably some money. As it is, I am compelled to spend neither.
They very easily could make systems that facilitates "emergent" gameplay, they don't because situations in which players have to make the game for the developers are generally seen as a fault, rather then a feature.
Not only that, but emergent gameplay is the least meaningful type of gameplay there is. Meaning in gameplay stems from the game world's ability to react to the things you do. The game can't respond to "emergent" scenarios because it was never programmed to recognize them in the first place.
At the end of the day, the rewards you get from said gameplay are going to be the same marks, dil, EC, and crafting materials you get now, which feed into the systems that already exist.
Star Citizen claims to allow the sort of "free play" that you desire, reminiscent of an actual tabletop RPG session.
Star Citizen has yet to launch, and may in fact never do so.
Can you see a connection between these two facts? (If not, perhaps a quick dip in the current state of the art vis-a-vis Artificial Intelligence is in order. I would recommend paying particular attention to the bizarre things that can come from neural nets. The Third Borg Dynasty isn't even in the same league as this stuff.)
I've played STO since launch, on and off. The most recent break being two whole years. I've come back to it and found it a lot of fun to get back into, to the point where I'm thinking of creating another alt (to add to the large already pile) and play through it all again, as well as maintaining my current trio of "main" characters.
It has, probably the best F2P experience I've ever seen in an MMO. No stupid restrictions on what you can do, all content is open to you from the get go (in terms of missions/TFO's etc. No need to subscribe so you can sprint or unlock more revives... (looking at you SWTOR). The events are always pretty decent, with good rewards for honestly next to no effort.
To put things into perspective, as well as being a Trek nut I'm also interested in military history including tanks, warships and aircraft. I play War Thunder which is a re;atvively decent game, more realistic than World of Tanks (blegh) but still arcadey and accessible enough I don't have to grab my HOTAS like I do for DCS. The events in that require you to literally play the damned thing like a full time job. The "easiest" events require at least 3-4 hours a day of grinding kills and specific tasks, or take part in a build event which is all RNG and almost forces you to purchase stuff for real money from the in-game market. Compare that to the T6 ship giveaways they do in the summer and winter events? A 1-2 minute run around the winter racetrack? It's a completely different ballpark.
STO on the other hand feels like a game which in many ways respects your time. You can log in, refine your dilithium, setup admiralty and DOFF missions. Play a few patrols/TFO's to get your daily bonuses for rep marks and log off if you need to without losing too much in the way of progress. That also makes it pretty alt friendly, especially with the endeavour system which is pretty awesome being account wide.
The missions are of good to excellent quality, and always improving. Ships are respectably priced compared to the "premium" vehicles you see in WoT/WT. The community generally is very friendly and welcoming to newcomers, it's honestly great to jump onto the game after a long day and just relax and immerse yourself in Star Trek. Play ships from whatever era you want, use what I consider to be one of the BEST character customisation systems in the MMO market and be whatever you want to be.
Does STO have its flaws? Of course it does, every game does. Do I hate how some of the coolest content/ships is locked behind lockboxes and promo R&D packs? Sure... however to call it a "bad" game is simply false. I got a friend to start playing on PS4 recently and they said the amount of content they could get... all for free was mindblowing to them. The games absolutely had its ups and downs over the years, however it's still going strong and I hope it does for a good while yet!
Looking for a dedicated Star Trek community? Visit www.ufplanets.com for details.
Except, in UO and SWG, it wasn't about collecting marks and stuff. All these rewards are nothing more than carrots on sticks as we run on a treadmill. I'm not the first to say that, and I won't be the last.
You know what would have happened had Fleet Holdings been public hubs we could all participate in regardless of fleet status? We would have all been playing together working towards building something tangible in the game. Participation of Fleets could have unlocked fleet stores just like in the holdings that exist. And while we are building these places, the devs could be creating and dropping in scenarios all over the game that we can run into while doing whatever it is we're doing.
Fleet holdings though were always meant to be specific to the Fleets though. That's what the idea of a "Fleet holding."
Imagine if the Admiralty system was more than Doffing with ships. Imagine being able to have a plan for some large scale vision, with the game allowing such a vision to become reality if enough players decide to play along. Now imagine the devs see what is shaping up and THEY react to the players by crafting story elements around it. This is a live service game. We are live participants in a changeable Gameworld. The devs COULD be like DMs and make on the fly reactionary modifications based on what we the players are doing.
Or they can simulate that by dropping in metrics trackers tied to predefined events, and not tell the players what metrics are being tracked or what the pending event is going to be. Yeah... I know that's a bit of a contradiction in terms of my stance against pre-scripted gameplay. However, because the trigger of said events and the events themselves are not forward facing, then the result is the appearance that the game IS responding to us. And if the events themselves are set up where they employ multiple pre-existing mechanics for different objectives, scaled with the notion that a LOT of people will be participating, then these events could last a while, and could even branch into subsequent events based on metrics tracking within the event itself.
I am honestly not sure if I'd like a system like this. Hubs like starbases are supposed to be areas that are outside of combative play, where people can go to do what they need to do in between missions. Neverwinter has a system in their instanced areas (similar to our adventure/battlezones) where events occur regardless of how many people are in the area or not. Depending on what the goal is i.e. come together to take down x dragon, the more people are working together to take it down, the faster it'll go down.
However, because of how STO is set up, battlezones don't really see too much use nowadays when you consider that most people can melt the battlezone enemies due to the level cap on most battlezones before Delta rising being set to 50. They'd have to up the level cap on these places in order to make it fair for everyone.
What sort of metrics based trigger am I talking about? One could be something as simple is player occupancy of an existing location. Say it goes X days at less than Y average number of players. It gets flagged for dev attention, and they can drop an event into that location and set objectives... Maybe its a starbase that sees very little player foot traffic that gets invaded and taken over by a hostile force. Or maybe some research project goes horribly wrong, resulting in a catastrophe that takes a lot of people to fix with a bunch of potential objectives needed to make it happen.
Another trigger could be based on how many of a certain type of enemy is being defeated in a specific area. If it reaches a certain threshold, reinforcements start showing up, and they will continue to spawn until a certain number of them have been defeated. But these sorts of things will only be effective if, like I said, we are not told what metrics are being tracked or what the events those metrics can trigger will be. Once an event runs its course, it would self-disable and flag itself on the devs' end as resolved. Or if they set it to recurring, it would reset itself and begin tracking the metrics again with a modified threshold based on player engagement from its previous run.
It sounds to me like you think a dev is going to be spending their day watching areas of the game, looking to see which area needs "a dev's attention" and just drop an event on the server while its still up and running. I'm sorry, but the devs don't just sit around like they have nothing better to do and watch the game. Whether its a content designer or a character artist, there's almost always something that they're working on.
This sort of thing is not impossible to do. But if we cannot have a truly emergent aspect to the game, I will at least settle for the illusion of one. I'm just tossing these scenarios out off the top of my head. Imagin what a single dev could do with a 40 hour work week just sitting there creating metrics-triggered events and placing them in the game where they make sense. Some of these events may take a while to trigger. Some may never trigger. But when they do, it would be player activity that causes it. And they would persist until resolved. Some events could have elements that tease a future story arc. Pretty much anything could be done with them. Hell for only $15/hr, I would sit behind a desk 8 hours a day five days a week churning out scenarios like this, knowing that it would give THOUSANDS of players stuff to do that occurs unexpectedly, all over the Gameworld.[/quote]
While an event that teases the next story element would be interesting, we know the devs like to play their cards close to their chest and only reveal things like story elements once they know they've got it nailed down. This is especially the case now since they're working with the writers of the newer Star Trek shows to figure out what elements they can put in the game from the shows, and figure out who they can get for the story.
as many have mentioned i have 9 years of building my account it is a lot of investment to walk away from. But if I had started playing within the last month I would have uninstalled this game and walked away without regret. Lag/rubberbanding/power tray misfires really spoil the fun. Behind the server issues is a really fun game but if I were a newbie I wouldn't stick around long enough to discover it
Hello rubber banding my old friend, time to bounce around the battlezone again, where are all my bug reports going?, out of love with this game I am falling, As Cryptic fail to acknowledge a problem exists, Shakes an angry fist, And from Support all I'm hearing are the sounds of silence.
Due to the number of things wrong with this game right now, walk away has been considered for over 18 months at this point.
The thing that keeps me here is cause i was stupid enough to buy the lifetime subscription on sale 3 yrs ago when the game still worked. Now i am screwed cause the game is broke and unplayable in some cases and not worth playing at this time till its fixed.
Star Citizen claims to allow the sort of "free play" that you desire, reminiscent of an actual tabletop RPG session.
Star Citizen has yet to launch, and may in fact never do so.
Can you see a connection between these two facts? (If not, perhaps a quick dip in the current state of the art vis-a-vis Artificial Intelligence is in order. I would recommend paying particular attention to the bizarre things that can come from neural nets. The Third Borg Dynasty isn't even in the same league as this stuff.)
Here's the thing. There are two types of MMOs:
Themepark style (STO fits this): Missions and systems are heavily scripted and controlled. Like a themepark, the Missions are rides. The first time you play them they may have things taht surprise you; but on replays, it's like a ride where you know what you're going to be experiencing, and what you'll get at the end.
Open-World style: (EVE Online and what they are going for with Star Citizen fit this): The Devs give you a large worls with a number of rules and mechanics, and some scripted mission content (although they try to make it appear that it's more 'open' by have different elements dropped in even though the scenario overall is scripted.)
(And FYI - SC's long development cycle isn't because it's open world <--- That's just a symptom per se. It's that they are attempting to do a variety of things on a scale that no one has really attempted - and that requires new software engine tech that's taking a long time to create and debug. The Alpha that they run 24/7 is interesting, but it IS an Alpha, with a lot of promised feature still being developed and introduced <--- with all their bugs too. I've backed and hope they will get it to Beta and to a Retail V 1.0 state that - like any MMO - they continue to iterate and add to; but yeah, there's the possibility it will not be able to get to that point either Time will tell.)
Formerly known as Armsman from June 2008 to June 20, 2012 PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
Look, for what it is, STO is an amazing game. But I am sorry... For what it COULD be based on the HISTORY of MMOs and what could be done in games older than many of the players of this game, it falls ridiculously short. All PWE wants to do is milk their RNG cash cow.
If all PWE wanted to do was milk their RNG cash cow, we wouldn't be seeing all the money we have seen being given for projects like the RTFO system, the new event system, the patrols/patrol system revamp, all these QOL updates to menus and the like, the redubbing of Noye, which was largely pointless, because none of that helps the RNG boxes. If all PWE cared about was RNG cash boxes, we would only be seeing more RNG cash boxes being added.
If anything, we have seen the opposite. PWE giving Cryptic large amounts of time and money to revisit older content and systems, and address many long standing player complaints about said systems.
you missed a point: if a game seems outdated, with ugly textures, etc, and if some stuff are not "given" (event ship etc), how a game could attract and keep players, who could eventually open gamble boxes.
Without improvements, the death of a game is predictable. Time and Money used for these improvements, are not a gift to the players, but an investment.
And these revamps, events are also for the reviewers, who can make people want to play at sto. + Take a look at all the links for the giveaways (in an other thread), it is clearly not only for us, but also to attract players -> who could eventually open gamble boxes. Because gamble boxes is the major way of earning cash, used by Cryptic. (R&d promo boxes currently)
On the other hand, in a sandbox environment like Eve Online, you can spend thousands of hours transporting stuff, and exploring space, earning money to get bigger ships, with better weapons, and the only thing you get rewarded with is the ability to do those same things, but slightly easier.
And maybe get ganked any time you have mined a decent amount of ore...
Which is a thing that is a problem any time players define the in-game world. If players BUILD the world, then they can also destroy it. Yeah, players who play solely for the fun of killing other players are rather common in every game that has them.
you missed a point: if a game seems outdated, with ugly textures, etc, and if some stuff are not "given" (event ship etc), how a game could attract and keep players, who could eventually open gamble boxes.
Without improvements, the death of a game is predictable. Time and Money used for these improvements, are not a gift to the players, but an investment.
And these revamps, events are also for the reviewers, who can make people want to play at sto. + Take a look at all the links for the giveaways (in an other thread), it is clearly not only for us, but also to attract players -> who could eventually open gamble boxes. Because gamble boxes is the major way of earning cash, used by Cryptic. (R&d promo boxes currently)
This is a faulty argument because it works solely on a conspiracy that literally everything the game devs do, at any point, it just some ploy to get people to open more gamble boxes. The problem with conspiracy theories however, is that they are conspiracies, and you can always just claim that everything that seems to prove the conspiracy wrong is just part of the conspiracy.
Games that are built, and developed, around making people open gamble boxes aren't subtle about it, just look at Star Wars Battlefront 2 for an example. If the game was such a thing then everything would be built around opening gamble boxes to get anywhere in the game, or get anything done in the game, and yet, in STO, you can do everything without opening a box number one.
With the design philosophy I've seen you preach OFC not. You would be far too stuck in the same quagmire Scam Citizen is, trying to code "everything" without want to accept that it isn't possible.
Maybe you should try to be less condescending, thx.
And you speak about conspiracy, you are the only one who see conspiracies everywhere.
All, the games have 1 objective, earn and keep players, and if these players spend money on the more advantageous thing in the point of view of the company, then BINGO! For STO, gamble boxes are this advantageous thing, it is just a fact.
If not, explain to me why they put the TOS constitution in a gamble box?
Well, what started out as one player talking about returning to the game has devolved into some snide, back-and-forth personal sniping about other MMOs and MMO development. So we'll just end this here. /Thread
Star Trek Online Volunteer Community Moderator and Resident She-Wolf
Community Moderators are Unpaid Volunteers and NOT Employees of Gearbox/Cryptic
Views and Opinions May Not Reflect the Views and Opinions of Gearbox/Cryptic
Comments
Star Citizen has yet to launch, and may in fact never do so.
Can you see a connection between these two facts? (If not, perhaps a quick dip in the current state of the art vis-a-vis Artificial Intelligence is in order. I would recommend paying particular attention to the bizarre things that can come from neural nets. The Third Borg Dynasty isn't even in the same league as this stuff.)
I've played STO since launch, on and off. The most recent break being two whole years. I've come back to it and found it a lot of fun to get back into, to the point where I'm thinking of creating another alt (to add to the large already pile) and play through it all again, as well as maintaining my current trio of "main" characters.
It has, probably the best F2P experience I've ever seen in an MMO. No stupid restrictions on what you can do, all content is open to you from the get go (in terms of missions/TFO's etc. No need to subscribe so you can sprint or unlock more revives... (looking at you SWTOR). The events are always pretty decent, with good rewards for honestly next to no effort.
To put things into perspective, as well as being a Trek nut I'm also interested in military history including tanks, warships and aircraft. I play War Thunder which is a re;atvively decent game, more realistic than World of Tanks (blegh) but still arcadey and accessible enough I don't have to grab my HOTAS like I do for DCS. The events in that require you to literally play the damned thing like a full time job. The "easiest" events require at least 3-4 hours a day of grinding kills and specific tasks, or take part in a build event which is all RNG and almost forces you to purchase stuff for real money from the in-game market. Compare that to the T6 ship giveaways they do in the summer and winter events? A 1-2 minute run around the winter racetrack? It's a completely different ballpark.
STO on the other hand feels like a game which in many ways respects your time. You can log in, refine your dilithium, setup admiralty and DOFF missions. Play a few patrols/TFO's to get your daily bonuses for rep marks and log off if you need to without losing too much in the way of progress. That also makes it pretty alt friendly, especially with the endeavour system which is pretty awesome being account wide.
The missions are of good to excellent quality, and always improving. Ships are respectably priced compared to the "premium" vehicles you see in WoT/WT. The community generally is very friendly and welcoming to newcomers, it's honestly great to jump onto the game after a long day and just relax and immerse yourself in Star Trek. Play ships from whatever era you want, use what I consider to be one of the BEST character customisation systems in the MMO market and be whatever you want to be.
Does STO have its flaws? Of course it does, every game does. Do I hate how some of the coolest content/ships is locked behind lockboxes and promo R&D packs? Sure... however to call it a "bad" game is simply false. I got a friend to start playing on PS4 recently and they said the amount of content they could get... all for free was mindblowing to them. The games absolutely had its ups and downs over the years, however it's still going strong and I hope it does for a good while yet!
Looking for a dedicated Star Trek community? Visit www.ufplanets.com for details.
Fleet holdings though were always meant to be specific to the Fleets though. That's what the idea of a "Fleet holding."
I am honestly not sure if I'd like a system like this. Hubs like starbases are supposed to be areas that are outside of combative play, where people can go to do what they need to do in between missions. Neverwinter has a system in their instanced areas (similar to our adventure/battlezones) where events occur regardless of how many people are in the area or not. Depending on what the goal is i.e. come together to take down x dragon, the more people are working together to take it down, the faster it'll go down.
However, because of how STO is set up, battlezones don't really see too much use nowadays when you consider that most people can melt the battlezone enemies due to the level cap on most battlezones before Delta rising being set to 50. They'd have to up the level cap on these places in order to make it fair for everyone.
It sounds to me like you think a dev is going to be spending their day watching areas of the game, looking to see which area needs "a dev's attention" and just drop an event on the server while its still up and running. I'm sorry, but the devs don't just sit around like they have nothing better to do and watch the game. Whether its a content designer or a character artist, there's almost always something that they're working on.
This sort of thing is not impossible to do. But if we cannot have a truly emergent aspect to the game, I will at least settle for the illusion of one. I'm just tossing these scenarios out off the top of my head. Imagin what a single dev could do with a 40 hour work week just sitting there creating metrics-triggered events and placing them in the game where they make sense. Some of these events may take a while to trigger. Some may never trigger. But when they do, it would be player activity that causes it. And they would persist until resolved. Some events could have elements that tease a future story arc. Pretty much anything could be done with them. Hell for only $15/hr, I would sit behind a desk 8 hours a day five days a week churning out scenarios like this, knowing that it would give THOUSANDS of players stuff to do that occurs unexpectedly, all over the Gameworld.[/quote]
While an event that teases the next story element would be interesting, we know the devs like to play their cards close to their chest and only reveal things like story elements once they know they've got it nailed down. This is especially the case now since they're working with the writers of the newer Star Trek shows to figure out what elements they can put in the game from the shows, and figure out who they can get for the story.
Hello rubber banding my old friend, time to bounce around the battlezone again, where are all my bug reports going?, out of love with this game I am falling, As Cryptic fail to acknowledge a problem exists, Shakes an angry fist, And from Support all I'm hearing are the sounds of silence.
The thing that keeps me here is cause i was stupid enough to buy the lifetime subscription on sale 3 yrs ago when the game still worked. Now i am screwed cause the game is broke and unplayable in some cases and not worth playing at this time till its fixed.
Here's the thing. There are two types of MMOs:
Themepark style (STO fits this): Missions and systems are heavily scripted and controlled. Like a themepark, the Missions are rides. The first time you play them they may have things taht surprise you; but on replays, it's like a ride where you know what you're going to be experiencing, and what you'll get at the end.
Open-World style: (EVE Online and what they are going for with Star Citizen fit this): The Devs give you a large worls with a number of rules and mechanics, and some scripted mission content (although they try to make it appear that it's more 'open' by have different elements dropped in even though the scenario overall is scripted.)
(And FYI - SC's long development cycle isn't because it's open world <--- That's just a symptom per se. It's that they are attempting to do a variety of things on a scale that no one has really attempted - and that requires new software engine tech that's taking a long time to create and debug. The Alpha that they run 24/7 is interesting, but it IS an Alpha, with a lot of promised feature still being developed and introduced <--- with all their bugs too. I've backed and hope they will get it to Beta and to a Retail V 1.0 state that - like any MMO - they continue to iterate and add to; but yeah, there's the possibility it will not be able to get to that point either
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
you missed a point: if a game seems outdated, with ugly textures, etc, and if some stuff are not "given" (event ship etc), how a game could attract and keep players, who could eventually open gamble boxes.
Without improvements, the death of a game is predictable. Time and Money used for these improvements, are not a gift to the players, but an investment.
And these revamps, events are also for the reviewers, who can make people want to play at sto. + Take a look at all the links for the giveaways (in an other thread), it is clearly not only for us, but also to attract players -> who could eventually open gamble boxes. Because gamble boxes is the major way of earning cash, used by Cryptic. (R&d promo boxes currently)
Which is a thing that is a problem any time players define the in-game world. If players BUILD the world, then they can also destroy it. Yeah, players who play solely for the fun of killing other players are rather common in every game that has them.
My character Tsin'xing
Maybe you should try to be less condescending, thx.
And you speak about conspiracy, you are the only one who see conspiracies everywhere.
All, the games have 1 objective, earn and keep players, and if these players spend money on the more advantageous thing in the point of view of the company, then BINGO! For STO, gamble boxes are this advantageous thing, it is just a fact.
If not, explain to me why they put the TOS constitution in a gamble box?
Views and Opinions May Not Reflect the Views and Opinions of Gearbox/Cryptic
Moderation Problems/Issues? Please contact the Community Manager
Terms of Service / Community Rules and Policies / FCT
Facebook / Twitter / Twitch